Joshua Giuliano's 'River' Slasher Premieres at TIFF — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "River" premieres Sept. 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival as Joshua Giuliano's debut feature, which he both wrote and directed.
- Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe and Max Mattern play three siblings who take their father's boat downriver to spread his ashes before a masked man begins hunting them.
- Giuliano drew on '70s slashers like "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Halloween" while intentionally subverting genre expectations, calling his goal a slasher "stripped down to its core elements."
- The film's cinematography, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock," is designed to create dissonance between West Virginia's beauty and on-screen brutality.
- Sound design is deployed as a tool to let the audience imagine what isn't shown — Giuliano calls sound a "loophole" that lets viewers "project their own thing onto the screen."
- Levy (2013's "Evil Dead") and Rothe (2017's "Happy Death Day") were cast partly because Giuliano knew they could shift from clashing personalities to "feral" intensity.
Why it matters: For genre fans, "River" pairs two established Scream Queens with a director framing his work as honoring '70s slasher DNA while subverting it — and a TIFF debut gives the debut feature a high-profile stage ahead of its Sept. 10 premiere.
Ask SkimNews
